Speculating on the Future of Human Reproduction and Artificial Wombs

We discuss the potential extinction of ethnic groups, human speciation through space colonization, future gender differences, genetic caste systems, and using selection technology to create gifted children. Razib shares his vision for the long-term genetic future of our species.

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the first, like, all my childhood. Assuming, that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden ish color as everyone just interbred with everyone else.

And, and what I'm seeing instead is like everyone moving in the direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities becoming more different from each other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course, speciation is going to happen when

Malcolm Collins: people get off. We ran a big study on this.

And one of the things that's most correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U S is xenophobia. Which means that we actually will likely preserve independent

Simone Collins: ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected, like, for the majority of my life. It's so weird.

Razib Khan: Yeah, I mean, the issue here is, like, also if you look at a country like Brazil or Cape Verde what happens is actually, like, even in, like, a genetically homogenous admixed population, there's still variation, and so people still look different, and so, if they're sorting based on physical type, There will be like, kind of like, [00:01:00] precipitation back out, if that makes sense.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Hello. We have a very special guest on Basecamp, Razeeb Khan. He is the CSO of Generate, which is a really, really cool startup, basically enabling people to use a lot of genetic technology and information that they haven't been able to use yet.

Plus he is the proprietor of unsupervised learning, which you can check out on Substack. Talk about deep dives on really cool genetic histories and all sorts of stuff. You had really better check it out. If you don't know about it yet, you're in for a treat. You can also just check out a lot of things that he's working on at razeemkhan.

Malcolm Collins: com. And he's probably one of the most famous in the world communicators on human genetic stuff when it comes, especially on the spicy side.

Razib Khan: Whenever people say that, I'm just like, why aren't there more communicators? I mean, it's like,

Malcolm Collins: Well, I'll tell you why there are more communicators. I'd say there are a number of other communicators, but I think a lot of the other communicators in this space go a little too hard on the race stuff.

Like they seem to have a [00:02:00] vested horse in the game, which pollutes their ability to Give the message. Whereas you come at it much more neutrally. Which I think is why you're such an effective communicator. And to that end, one thing I wanted to ask is where do you think the future of humanity is going genetically speaking?

Like, are we going to see a die off of ethnic groups? Are we going to see new ethnic groups? Are we going to see You know, who does well in this coming world? What's going on?

Razib Khan: Yeah, it's complicated because you know, these sorts of linear projections, not necessarily linear, but just like, I mean, obviously they're exponential too, but you know, like in 1900, if you had asked me this you know, the, the theory was like all the colored races were going to disappear because the fertility of.

of white Europeans was so high and they were conquering all the continents and settling everything. Obviously that's not what ended up happening. So it just goes to show you that these like very, very long term projections. So for example, like people like, oh, there's going to be like 5 billion people in Africa in 2100.

I mean, that's, [00:03:00] I'm exaggerating. I think it's close to like 3 billion or 4 billion. Okay. I just don't think that there will be I think that those are overestimates. Probably and you know, the transition will be faster you know, since like about the 1980s, the UN has actually consistently over predicted population growth because as you guys know, a demographic transition has been happening everywhere and fertility is crashing everywhere.

And so it just depends on where so in any case I think like Peter Zahon says, Oh, the Chinese people are going to disappear. I'm like, look. They got a low fertility, but like there's 1. 4 billion of them. I mean, you know, they're not going to like, they're not going to disappear. Okay. There's like 20 million Jews.

And like, we're not like, Oh, the Jews are going to disappear. You know, the reason the Jews are not going to disappear is ultra Orthodox Jews have high fertility. Right. So, they're still going to be around. If you read Frank Herbert's Dune, they're still around, you know? So you just need some of them that really want to reproduce.

And wait, who are

Malcolm Collins: the Jews in Frank Herbert's

Razib Khan: Dune? They work with the Bene Gesserit. Yeah. Really? That's fascinating! Yeah, they're still around. They're still around. Well, do you know Kweezout's [00:04:00] Hatarak is Hebrew? No! No!

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Alice Wilde! I had no idea.

Simone Collins: Yeah, mind blown. Mind blown. Are

Malcolm Collins: we going the Tleilaxi route with our family?

Razib Khan: You know what? So, I have a, I have a friend do you know what an axolotl tank is?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, of course, it's what became the Tleilaxi females. They basically turned them into birthing tanks. So

Razib Khan: I have, I have a friend who got her eggs harvested, and she has, like, she produced a lot of eggs. And so I was like, you would be a really great axolotl tank.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, how long till we get axolotl tanks? Like, do you see some groups basically getting rid of women when we get

Razib Khan: artificial wombs? Yeah. Yeah. So I do think in terms of what's going to happen, I do think diversification is probably going to be a thing within a hundred years. You will have like sects of humans that are naturals, others that are probably going to do like legit transhumanism.

 I mean, assuming our technological civilization [00:05:00] continues, you know, and then I do think there will be. You know, I mean, look, there's got to be like groups of gay men actually just groups of people in general, like women as well, because they don't want to give birth, you know, they don't want to go through the body, all that information they're going to use our throttle tanks.

The main issue is. I don't think they're going to be necessarily benign, you know, they're not going to be like, you know, dead or like brain dead, you know, plexiglass, but but the point is like the issue, the issue though, is like, all right, actually, you know, this is going to be fixed. They're going to test it on, on like animals, but.

The first ones are going to be bad, right? Yeah. It's just like, you know, C sections cause some issues, et cetera, et cetera. You know,

Malcolm Collins: I'm going to push back here. I heard a theory on this that was actually pretty compelling to me that it may turn out when we first start doing artificial wombs, that the children coming out of them are actually dramatically healthier than children born from natural wombs.

Because they don't have any restrictions on resources. And so even though they're not able to give people everything at just the [00:06:00] right time, keep in mind this is an environment where the mother is basically never sick, because they're not interacting with the world. There's no restriction on the resources they're giving the kids.

So it may be the difference we saw with the Flynn effect, where like all of a sudden, during a person's developmental period, they were given way more resources than they ever would have been historically, and were getting like 14 pound babies.

Razib Khan: And what about babies that pop out and they can like talk

Malcolm Collins: now? We got to, we got to aim for that. Actually, so, so one of the things that I've thought about, and you can tell me this is crazy that I was like, okay, well, one of the things I suspect to happen as smart people become a rarer asset in the future and one that companies really need is that there will be a huge economic incentive for companies to create their own humans.

And you know, one of the things we're really actually trying to do is the Collins Institute is make child rearing at scale of like gifted Children, like, like scalable and inexpensive. So, like, a company could [00:07:00] implement this program without much human intervention, so long as they were producing people and caring for them in the first, like, 3 or 4 years of

Razib Khan: their lives.

Yeah, yeah, but I mean, that just sounds like a small nation, right? Well, I

Simone Collins: mean, sorry, I mean, yeah, I guess, like, I mean, you, you could do it as a company. You could do as an, I'm sure nations will do it as well. I mean,

Malcolm Collins: what's it like,

Razib Khan: it's basically the kibbutz system, right? Yeah. Like they didn't perfect it, they didn't get it to work right, but that's, yeah, they're like collective raising of these children.

Yeah. And they're all for the ends of the corporate, you know, the idea is like they stay on the kibbutz, which didn't work out usually. Yeah,

Simone Collins: that's the problem Yeah But I mean when once you like can actually sort of genetically manipulate children You can even like make them require some kind of proprietary enzyme that only you provide.

I can't

Malcolm Collins: leave.

Razib Khan: Okay This is this is this is a this is actually I think been written about and there are films about these sorts of things right where it's like Basically, it's like yeah you they have a You know, it's, it's like, you know, like Blade Runner, right? Yeah. Like they have time bomb and that's how you control them and stuff [00:08:00] like that.

Mm-hmm. , I mean, is it possible? Yeah. Is it feasible? Yeah. We might have, we, yeah, we might have to have a Butlery and Jihad. We'll see ,

Malcolm Collins: you know, whatever it takes. Just, you know what he's talking about. That was the jihad against ai, right?

Razib Khan: Against thinking machines. Yeah. But they also. They also it says Jihad also against like, genetic engineering and other things.

Oh,

Malcolm Collins: they won't beat the genetically engineered. That's

Razib Khan: That's basically The issue is that Betty and Jezra don't use, like, official genetic engineering. What they do is, like, is breeding. Like, they don't use, like, selective breeding. That's what they do.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, um, okay, so, so, the, uh, we were talking about ethnic groups, like, not going extinct, you're like, well, the Chinese aren't going to go extinct, but there are groups that I am genuinely afraid for, like, the two that I always mention are actually both in India, which is the Jains and the Parsi I was wondering, are you worried for them?

Are there other ethno groups that you're, like, particularly worried about, or do you just not care that certain groups are going to go extinct?

Razib Khan: I mean, the [00:09:00] Parsi's probably, but I mean, they have some issues in terms of, uh, yeah, they have. So, I mean, so Parsis, as most of your listeners might know, as our Austrians in India genetically, they're about three fourths Iranian, one fourth Gujarati, and they've been Indianized a lot of their cultural habits.

So they speak Gujarati. They don't speak any Persian language, obviously. They eat Gujarati food and they have like. Names that are often, I mean, they have names like Khusrow, but they often have like, you know, like Patel or whatever, you know, or Gandhi. So like Indira Gandhi's husband was a Parsi. His last name was Gandhi.

That's a Gujarati name. Okay. So, you know, they're kind of cool, but like there are other Zoroastrians elsewhere. And one thing that, one thing that the Parsis did is they integrated kind of like Indian caste system. And so they really frown upon intermarriage and outmarried children are kind of expelled from the group.

That's one of the reasons they're shrinking. So to be like an official Parsi, you have to have two Parsi parents. And this is actually like nothing to do with their Zoroastrian religion. It has to do with their [00:10:00] becoming Indian. And so it's just like, yeah, I mean, but I mean, that's just how, that's how they're set up.

And it's just like, kind of like. You know, with modernity and their advances and their, you know, high, like, yeah, you

Malcolm Collins: remind me of like a zoologist talking about pandas, but we just can't get them to f**k in captivity. Like, we're trying, we're trying, but they're f*****g pandas. Well, it's

Simone Collins: interesting because it suggests like that there's this certain like just right spot Goldilocks zone of xenophobia where like.

You, you, you can't be like too xenophobic, like if you like, you know, get too weird about marrying out, like it's hard to get enough people like critical mass and like keep going. But if you're not xenophobic enough, like then you're just going to glom into like the main population. So you have to be just like, just a little bit xenophobic and then you're okay.

Razib Khan: Yeah. So, you know, the Jews in China disappeared cause they intermarried out. The Jews in Kaifeng, if you look at them, they just, they got assimilated into the Chinese system. [00:11:00] Hold on, you have to

Malcolm Collins: go deeper here. When did the Jews immigrate to China? I am not familiar with this story. This is weird.

Razib Khan: Yeah, I mean, people can just Google the Jews of Kaifeng.

They're probably like Radhanite traders, so they're Persian Jews. Probably showed up around the Mongol period, if not earlier. The Chinese consistently had problems distinguishing them from Muslims, you know, because they worship one god, they didn't eat pork. All the other stuff is kind of like, what, whatever, you know, so, like they, they would call them things like black hat Muslims or something like that, but like the really Jews that like, they don't really know, you know, they're all like, what weird but yeah, so they show up in Kaifeng they're well known the Jesuits show up in the six in the late 1500s and they encountered them and they were super curious about them because these are Jews that didn't really interact much with Christians at all.

And so they're like, Oh, like you guys are going to like, Have like the secret knowledge of how like Christianity is actually right and you guys are hiding the fact that like Jesus was actually the Messiah Anyway, there's some weird things like that So they were they were around for like many many centuries and what happened is by the 18th century the Jesuits that were [00:12:00] The Europeans that encountered them had noticing that they'd really been assimilated since like the 1500s I just like they look much more Chinese like the original ones were like had West Asian features a lot of them By the 18th century, they were much more Chinese looking and you know, the local rabbi of the community he was super embarrassed because his Chinese wife was was you know, she had pigs in the front yard.

And he knew that like the Chinese don't care. They're like, whatever. But he knew that the Christian would be like, wait,

Yeah, but like, you know, and his sons were had, were in like the, were Chinese civil servants and stuff like that. So what happened in the 19th century, there was a flood, the community scattered and they either like became Han, so they assimilated into the Han majority or they became Muslim. And there are still some Hui Muslim families in like that area of China.

And also Han families who know that they have the Jewish ancestry. [00:13:00] Some of them have gone back to Judaism now, but yeah, some of them have like.

Malcolm Collins: Fascinating. Okay. So to that end, cause this is one thing you touched on and I'm wondering what you're thinking about it. So we're talking about genetic isolation of populations.

Do you see. Intentional genetic isolation becoming more of a thing in the future, i. e. more, I don't want to call it human speciation, but human, like, ethnic speciation becoming more of a thing as IQ is dropping in the general

Razib Khan: population. So, you know what, I think the speciation will happen, I think this is, like, pretty straightforward, when we get off planet.

Oh, immediately, yeah. I think basically like people are just like they don't want to like go to I don't want to go to f*****g Mars I don't care how tall and you know stretched out s**t You know what I'm saying? Like of course there's gonna be like, you know bumble is gonna be like interplanetary option Like if you really like tall chicks You want to go for a Martian, but the problem is you better have some money to get all the way over there because you're like only six foot two.

Malcolm Collins: What [00:14:00] I love is in this world, humans were the dwarfs. The ones who are on earth are the short stout, like stern boned ones. And the ones who go to Mars are the, the elf like people. nO, but people I think underestimate if, if it continues to be expensive to do interplanetary travel, which I think will be a thing for hundreds of years that we will definitely have full speciation.

Simone Collins: Yeah, it's just so, it's so interesting. It's hard for me to wrap my head around it because I spent the first, like, all my childhood. Assuming, because it was kind of like, I don't know, just assumed everywhere that I grew up, that everyone was just going to sort of become the same like golden ish color as everyone just interbred with everyone else.

And, and what I'm seeing instead is like everyone moving in the direction of glomming off in these more isolated communities becoming more different from each other instead of all kind of the same. It's just so weird. And then of course, speciation is going to happen when

Malcolm Collins: people get off. We ran a big study on this.

And one of the things that's most correlated with fertility rate, at least in the U S is xenophobia. Which means [00:15:00] that we actually will likely preserve independent

Simone Collins: ethnic groups. It's just the opposite of what I expected, like, for the majority of my life. It's so weird.

Razib Khan: Yeah, I mean, the issue here is, like, also if you look at a country like Brazil or Cape Verde what happens is actually, like, even in, like, a genetically homogenous admixed population, there's still variation, and so people still look different, and so, if they're sorting based on physical type, There will be like, kind of like, precipitation back out, if that makes sense.

Does that make sense? And so it's

Malcolm Collins: not like I don't understand that. Oh, explain. Precipitation back out. They're selecting a lake, then that ends up precipitating into the

Razib Khan: community. Yeah, or like in Brazil, it's known Because in Brazil, a lot of families are of a mixed background and it's not like weird to say that that's my white brother or that's my black brother because they look that different.

Oh wow. And there is there is some evidence that people actually start, they sort based on what they look like, even though they have the same. So it's like, [00:16:00] there could be someone who, there could be someone who is like, you know, looks kind of white. In a mixed race family and they end up pairing with someone who looks kind of white in another mixed race family So their ancestry is no different than the darker people, but yeah, because they're selecting on that subset.

So it's positive assortative mating That's what I'm talking about IQ but you know physical things are also like pretty salient to people Yeah. And in a place like Brazil, there's like, skin color prejudice. And so people that are lighter skinned you know, they have an incentive to pair up with people that are lighter skinned.

Well, and

Simone Collins: I think people just tend to like people that look like them often. I mean, not always, but it seems to happen where people similar to each other. Yeah. You're just thinking too much of me and Malcolm. Whenever I am at a party with Malcolm these days, I'm like, when I'm trying to like point to him, I'm like, Oh, the guy who looks like my brother, that's my husband.

Razib Khan: This is, this is, this is how, how we know you're autistic. Cause like, yes, people think that, but very few people say that.

Simone Collins: Autism confirmed. It works though. It works [00:17:00] way better than, you know, my husband who's over there now. So, so do

Malcolm Collins: you think that when we begin to have genetically selected humans, do you think that we will have the possibility of a caste system or do you think, because I know you've talked about the caste system before, and I'm wondering, like, like once we can select.

for specific traits that are of utility to specific professions, like, you know, charisma versus stemminess. Do you think that, like, the only stable long term iteration of humanity as a caste system, or do you think that there's a way you could have this sort of selection without caste

Razib Khan: systems forming?

Yeah, so I think like the Indian type caste system requires like a religious justification. The part is that the gene flow is so f*****g low. So I think a normal, like, more like colloquial caste system. But I mean, if you read Greg Clark's work about social stability of like, you know, status and all that stuff, and that's a legit thing there in the work, but there's still permeability.

There's still people moving up and moving down and those [00:18:00] sorts of things. So I think that's going to be more likely just because I, you know, most human societies have not sacralized. Social status that way. Like India is the exception, not the rule. But if you sacralize social status, like only those with that blood can do that thing, then yes, it could emerge.

So it depends on the religious aspect. Will you create a religion out of it? So

Malcolm Collins: I don't know if you saw this, there was a study on this that I thought was really fascinating. done in the UK. And you know, in the U S we were often like, well, we're not descended, you know, if you're from a white U S background, they're like, Oh, we didn't have a caste system.

And I'm like, bro, your, your, your last name is Smith and his next name is Weaver. And there was an interesting study that looked at people with the last name Weaver and found that they had. higher dexterity manual dexterity even today and people with last name Smith had higher grip strength even today.

I don't know if you've seen that one. I thought it was interesting in terms of, yeah, I

Razib Khan: think I saw that. And then also like, like people with these sorts of like, you know, you know, working class or blue collar artisanal [00:19:00] artisanal names are still much more average to like below average and social status.

I mean, so what Greg Clark shows is. You know, what is it like the persistence of social status, like 0. 8 per generation, which is pretty high. But so what happens is there's a lot of noise from one from generation not to generation one. And so people extrapolate from that, but what actually happens is there's often regression back.

To something that's more ancestral. And so I think the statistic is like, so in, in the year 1100, every single officer in the British army was basically Norman because they just replaced all the Anglo Saxons. Like in the 20th century, 10 percent are Norman, even though like less than 1 percent of the names in the British population are

Malcolm Collins: Norman.

Fascinating. And so from that, you can calculate, you know. Yeah, another study I heard on this that really was profound to me was looking at China. And you know, looking at the number of people in the Chinese government today, like high [00:20:00] level Chinese government who were descended from aristocratic families in China.

And this is insane because if you know anything about the Chinese revolution, these families were ground to death. Dust. They lost everything and were treated worse than every other person in society. And yet, somehow, they all bubbled back. It was something like 80 percent of the people in high level positions of power came from an aristocratic family from the, the, the last dynastic period.

Which was just wild to me that even when they were, had everything taken away from them, society reassorted that way. And we've

Simone Collins: seen this with like post Soviet countries too, I think, right? Yeah. There's lots

Malcolm Collins: of Or

Razib Khan: you, or you see like the descendants of the banking families in Florence from the 1400s, or the Swedish like nobility in the 17th and 18th century, these sorts of things.

Now this doesn't mean that like we have like a fixed caste status. There are people that go up and people that go down. Traditionally in a Malthusian environment, actually, a lot of people just went down. The lower classes didn't reproduce themselves. [00:21:00] So that, like, for example, Oliver Cromwell was like gentry, but, you know, he was like, he's one of my ancestors, by the way.

Okay. Well, he was, his grandfather was super rich. And so, like, he, like, in his generation had gone way, way down, and that was common in terms of, like, downward mobility, and then, like, the lower classes just didn't reproduce themselves. Obviously, it's not, like, how it is today, but still, the point is, people still go up, people still go down, but there's also, like, a rough, like, you know, I don't know, I mean...

Yeah, it's just, if you like look at people's family backgrounds, you can see that a lot of people have actually not moved as far as you would think. Like a

Simone Collins: regression to a certain level of wealth. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: and of course these are things that can be changed now with genetic selection technology, which removes one of the biggest barriers in society to true equality.

Razib Khan: Sort of. Yeah, I agree. The only thing is, like, if everyone has access to it, then it'll just, like, change the baseline, which is okay.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I don't think it will. So, everyone has access [00:22:00] to it, but the groups that will use it, I think, are incredibly rare. I think, if you look at the people who are actually having kids in our society, maybe two to three percent would really use this technology en masse.

And I asked you, you know, before this interview, I was like, oh, the calculation for determining how quickly you know, if we're creating about the number of embryos we're creating, and we're selecting about the number of kids that we're selecting, And you did this for five generations. And then I looked at like the, the current technology and we should be looking at about a three standard deviation increase in IQ if you were selecting for IQ only which is pretty crazy that any,

Razib Khan: any cultural group, we have the, we have, we have the technology, we have the technology.

Malcolm Collins: Today. Yeah. Yeah. Really cool. Which is, which is wild. And it, it, it's, it's one of the things I think about where a lot of people who promote like, Oh, you know, we should be really accepting of people who are different. And then I'm like, Oh, I'm trying to create people who are different. And they're like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, that's performative.[00:23:00]

Razib Khan: Normie conformity. Like when really weird people actually show up, they're like, whoa,

Malcolm Collins: whoa. Yeah. It's funny, actually. We the episode that went live right before we were filming this one was the episode where I was going over Nassib Taleb's argument that IQ doesn't matter at all.

Simone Collins: Well, then it's a like, what did he say made by Charlotte?

He's so

Malcolm Collins: performative. Like, like, come on, man. Like, you know, this

Razib Khan: matters. Anyway. Well, I mean, you know, it doesn't matter because he calls people f*****g retards all the time.

Malcolm Collins: You end

Simone Collins: the film. Destroyed. Destroyed. I love it. One thing I do wonder about is Like what the selective pressures will be in the future in terms of gender, like on one end, I see all these fundamentalist groups that are like getting super aggressive and also like probably encouraging a lot of differentiation between the sexes.

But then like, when you look at the more technophilic sectors of society or like cultures within society, They're like more blank slate is like, no, there [00:24:00] shouldn't be any differences between genders and whether or not they're actually are genetically. They're trying to pretend there aren't, maybe they'll try to select against it.

Like where, where will the future of gender go or where is it even now? I,

Razib Khan: yeah, so I mean with the trans stuff, one thing I will say, like, I don't talk too much about it but part of it is it is like modern trans gender therapy, especially for children is transhumanism. Yeah, yeah, and so that's how you that's how you eliminate the gender differences you biologically go in and tinker Yeah, you know and so that's how you would do it and you can create homo androgynous if you want to the main the main issue that we're having right now is I think with the trans stuff is the mixing of normie brain with transhumanist technology.

So I've said this elsewhere, but you know, I knew people who are transhumanists like 15 years ago and they're mostly autistic. buT now, now these people, they don't call themselves transhumanists. Like, you know, they're like gender fluid or whatever the [00:25:00] hell, but like, but they're normie brained in terms of like, now they're attaching identitarian politics to it.

That's the fundamental issue. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: If you're talking about the genetic differences that would be caused by transness, you're actually going to see an increase in gender dimorphism between the two genders because of the men who are born thinking more like women and the women who are born thinking more like men are systemically removed from the genetic pool within the progressive population.

That means the progressive who are still breeding are eventually selecting against androgynous and

Simone Collins: fembots. Yeah. Huh. Okay. So even among like progressive cultures where people like really welcome transness, even that's going to be selected against. Yeah.

Razib Khan: And as you guys know that this has been like research that goes back a generation.

It's just obviously cultures that have like give a lot of freedom to gender expression often shake out to be more dimorphic in a lot of ways. Yeah, in a lot of the, in a lot of the non performative, visible ways. So men and women in Sweden may dress more similarly than men and women in Turkey, [00:26:00] but women tend to major in much fewer stemmy things than in Turkey.

Hypothetically,

Malcolm Collins: this is a selective pressure, i. e. In societies where it is more accepted that male and female roles aren't different from each other, the women who have a biological predilection to take on more masculine roles end up having fewer kids. Same with the men who take on more feminine roles and that then doesn't select them out of the gene pool, leading to a higher amount of inborn gender dimorphism.

Razib Khan: Yeah. I mean, it could be, I mean, you'd have someone have to like run the simulation. That's the way you would do it. Yeah. Cause like, you know, we've had it since we've had it since world war two, right. The sort of kind of like super egalitarian viewpoint. And you know, ironically, you know, a lot of things are not as different in Sweden.

Like there's a lot of. sexual just like dichotomous behavior because men and women are different on average. That's just a fact.

Simone Collins: [00:27:00] Well, and they're given the freedom to make those choices. And so they do.

Razib Khan: Well, I mean, so also like, you know, one of the things that you see in like a lot of the conservative countries is STEM is a way for women to actually break out of the box because if they're, if they're a successful engineer at the end of the day, people still need successful engineers.

And so, you know, women's women in a lot of these conservative countries, you see them, they. They select STEM in particular, not because like, Oh, I have a passion for engineering, but they know that that is a path to social liberation that they otherwise would not have. Whereas in Sweden, you don't need to be an engineer to be like respected like a man.

You know, you have equal rights, you know, at least nominally, at least like legally, you know, and so, like in Italy, Italy during Mussolini's period they privileged philosophy and the humanities over science. And so men tended to go into philosophy of the humanities and there were more women in STEM.

Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: That's

Simone Collins: really, I didn't know that. Why did

Malcolm Collins: they do that?

Razib Khan: I think they wanted to [00:28:00] create like, you know. The fascist ideology. And so the philosophers, the philosopher Kings were privileged, you know, weird. So scientists are technicians, you know, that's what they thought. Oh, that wasn't like high status there.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: That's secretary work. And

Malcolm Collins: I think your performance in the war shows how, how far that gets you. This has been a fantastic conversation. Honestly, one of my favorite interviews so far. I am so excited that we got a chance to chat with you. Please, please, please go check out his sub stack. If you want detailed genetic information on humans, the spiciest stuff that you're not going to get at this level anywhere else.

learning guys, you know? And if you are interested in, if you run any sort of genetics company, because actually our audience is like a lot of entrepreneurs and stuff like that, and you're interested in, in cutting edge technology, no receives a guy to reach out to, and thank you so much for joining us.

And, and also [00:29:00] thank you so much for, for all of the people you help in this space, because I was mentioning on the last episode you help so many young people in this space and it really

Razib Khan: makes a difference to them. Yeah. I mean, Yeah, I guess so. I don't remember that, but I'm not sure. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: you don't see it that way.

So, he mentioned in the last episode, he's like, I really like babies, and I'm like, this is again, not a thing that's known about him. He really likes babies. He is the most, if there was some pronatalist, polygenic score here, I need to capture it from his genome. I'm gonna need to like, have my descendants review it to try to find Whatever makes him so into it.

Yeah, like

Simone Collins: best dad. Best dad. Yeah. Like unbelievable. So yeah, huge fans, obviously. We love you so much, Riziv. Thank you so much for coming on.

Malcolm Collins: It was my pleasure.